MECSH Program Goals

The program goals are:

• Improve transition to parenting by supporting mothers through pregnancy. This includes providing support with the mother’s and family’s psychosocial and environmental issues, supporting the health and development of the family including older children, providing opportunity for discussion, clarification and reinforcement of clinical antenatal care provided by usual antenatal midwifery and obstetric services, and preparation for parenting.
• Improve maternal health and wellbeing by helping mothers to care for themselves. Guided by a strengths-based approach, the nurse/health visitor will support and enable the mother and the family to enhance their coping skills, problem solving skills and ability to mobilise resources; foster positive parenting skills; support the family to establish supportive relationships in their community; mentor maternal-infant bonding and attachment; and provide primary health care and health education.
• Improve child health and development by helping parents to interact with their children in developmentally supportive ways. This includes supporting and modelling positive parent-infant interaction, promoting parent-child relationships, and delivery of a standardised, structured child development parent education program.
• Develop and promote parents’ aspirations for themselves and their children. This includes supporting parents to be future oriented for themselves and their children, modelling and supporting effective skills in solving day to day problems and promoting parents’ capacities to parent effectively despite the difficulties they face in their lives.
• Improve family and social relationship and networks by helping parents to foster relationships within the family and with other families and services. This includes modelling and supporting family problem solving skills, supporting families to access family and formal and informal community resources and providing opportunities for families to interact with other local families.

MECSH program model

Details

Last Updated on 19 January 2023